CNN Student News And Printable Worksheet

CNN Student News? Holy schmoly, where were you when I was in the classroom? I love this service and can’t believe I haven’t used it before.

CNN Student News offers a ten-minute, commercial-free, daily news program aimed primarily at middle and high school classes, although you’ll always want to screen the stories (usually three or four per episode) before sharing with your classes. Journalists at CNN create the stories and the broadcast, and it’s free of charge throughout the school year. Recent show topics included highlights from the U.N. General Assembly, a NASA announcement concerning Mars, and a Character Study involving a food desert. One feature I enjoy is when the host does his Roll Call of one or more schools across the country and what they’ve recently been doing.

As I began digging a bit deeper into the resource, Barbara Cotter, a SimpleK12 Teacher Learning Community member, supplied a nifty resource.

Barbara shared this link to a CNN Student News Guided Worksheet. This worksheet helps teachers and student keep track of the CNN student news for the week by providing a framework to describe each day’s stories and then to put some context around them.

In the worksheet, your students are prompted to define ‘what’s the word,” list an event from this day in history, and describe the “Before We Go” segment, among other things.

You can also find additional CNN Student News links here, depending upon your medium of choice:

So, what do you think? Do you like or use CNN Student News? If so, please leave a comment and tell us how you incorporate this into your classroom. If it doesn’t appeal to you, please explain why. Do you have other student news resources you use? Where is this sort of resource most relevant?

About Michael Werner

6 Comments

I haven’t checked out the program yet but based on the description it sounds like it could be used at the beginning/end of the day (or class if you don’t teach the same group throughout the day) – just because that is often there might be some time to fill. Using this time to look at current events would be awesome too… because the world extends far beyond the community/city/province/country they live in… and sometimes they don’t always realize this.

I like the worksheet but would likely change it a little to make it bigger (so that students have more room to write responses). I really liked the reflection part of the worksheet… I know my students could always use a little extra practice with summarizing.

I use CNN Student News with my 4th graders. Wow do I love it! It is a great way to get kids caring about issues outside of their neighborhood and locating totally different places on the map, I have tried a number of structures concerning CNN student news in my classroom, none of them have been perfect but I always incorporate ELA standards into the student responses.

I use CNN Student News in my daily home school class room; for my 3rd and 5th grader. They love reporting the news to their father and I. It is so refreshing to see them current on events. Thank you for keeping my children interested.